Chapter 3

Ihad one of those dreams again.

The ones with the male who felt like a lost part of me, like the missing piece to my puzzle, yet I never clearly saw his face. Night after night, I’d dream of him—visions of warmth, of passion, of humor. Fleeting images and sensations, whispered words, and such deep yearning. And though I’d always wake with a feeling of something precious being wrenched away from me, with a pulsing hole in my chest, I continued to seek sleep despite not needing it.

Because those dreams…they were the most genuine things I’d felt since opening my eyes to the reality of being an angel.

Tonight, in the recesses of my mind, I found myself—not knowing how we got there, as it usually was the case with dreams—backed up against a wall by this mysterious stranger, his body hard and hot and pressing into mine in all the right places. All my nerve endings responded to his nearness with electric excitement, my skin tingling and my breath going fast.

As always, I couldn’t make out his face—every time I tried to focus on his features, my vision swam or something would happen that would pull my gaze somewhere else.

But even though I didn’t know what he looked like exactly, the feel of him was branded into my very soul. His scent, his energy, the push of his power against my senses.

He grasped my right hand and pressed something into my palm. I blinked as he wrapped my fingers around the long, slender object and then brought it up between us, his hand enveloping mine holding the item—a dagger, the black blade gleaming with iridescence in the light of the torches near us.

With wide eyes, I watched how he steered my hand to lay the weapon against his throat.

My heart pounded in my chest, my knees wobbling.

“This dagger,” the enigmatic male said into the heated space between us, “is forged in Hell. As such, it is one of the few weapons that can make me bleed.” For a moment, I could discern the swirl of silver eyes amid the vague outline of his face. “And kill me.”

I sucked in a breath. My fingers around the hilt trembled ever so slightly, and he gently firmed his grip around mine.

“Now,” he murmured as he leaned in further, the blade digging precariously into the vulnerable skin at his throat, “can we talk?”

I jolted awake, yanked out of the dream by the pillow that had hit me square in the face. Heart still pounding from the tension of the scene with Tall, Dark, and Mysteriously Handsome, I blinked at Bifiel’s annoyed expression as she stared me down from where she stood next to my bed.

My roommate was blessed with looks even more enchanting than a human supermodel’s, her skin a healthy alabaster streaked with a rose blush, her golden locks framing a face of graceful lines so finely drawn that it was like God himself had breathed beauty right into her.

Unfortunately, she mostly wore an expression so sour it counteracted the natural amiability of her features.

Like now, as she regarded me with the same countenance one would a cockroach that had inexplicably survived multiple extermination attempts and had the gall to still infest the room.

“I can’t believe how lazy you are,” she hissed. “Sleeping every single night. What are you—human?” She clucked her tongue. “Get up. Your shift’s about to start. You don’t want to be late again, do you?”

“What’s it to you?” I grumbled as I heaved my butt out of bed.

“I don’t want to live with someone who doesn’t take being an angel seriously.” She jabbed a finger into my chest. “You dishonor the Heavenly Host. Lazing around like you’re still a mortal…it’s unbecoming. A waste of powers and grace, if you ask me.”

“Well, it’s a good thing no one’s asking you,” I said and bumped my shoulder hard into hers as I passed her.

“You besmirch—” she called out after me.

“The name of angel,” I yelled as I shut the bathroom door behind me. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Rolling my eyes, I undressed and stepped into the shower.

Bifiel was an angel-made, like me. Not born to the privilege of serving in Heaven, but selected upon her death due to charitable behavior in life. Considering her attitude here and now, I had a hard time believing she’d ever been selfless as a human, but maybe the whole memory wipe thing when she’d ascended had done a number on her character.

In any case, Bifiel was overzealous when it came to being an angel, as if she wanted to make up for the fact that she hadn’t been born one, or rather, live up to the honor bestowed upon her when she’d ascended. It was like she’d made it her whole personality. As though she wanted to win some sort of Bestest, Most Pious Angel in Heaven Award and, at the same time, audition for a position on a yet-to-be-founded Inquisitorial Angel Squad whose sole purpose it was to police other angels and reprimand them for their lack of angel-like behavior.

Perhaps I should let Naamah sprinkle her bed with itching powder after all.

Luckily for me, Bifiel was nowhere to be seen when I emerged from the bathroom, ready to go to work. She’d probably gone to brush every single one of her feathers or practice conjuring a halo over her head.

The only thing shaking up the dreary monotony of the day ahead of me was that after my shift, I would finally get to meet the angel who would train me. Naamah had sent me word yesterday, a week after we’d talked, that she’d arranged a meeting time and place with Aziel, giving me instructions on where to go.

Excitement fizzed in my belly when I thought about the meeting. I both looked forward to and dreaded the encounter, because while I definitely wanted and needed someone to train me in order to rise up in the ranks, I was apprehensive about how it would go. What would Aziel be like? How would he act? He was kind of forced to do this due to the favor he owed Naamah, so would he treat me with condescension and thinly veiled resentment?

I’d come across enough higher-ranking angels to know that they often openly sneered at those who ranked below them, as if someone’s position in the hierarchy immediately determined inherent worth. As if being of lower status and having less power meant one didn’t deserve to be met with respect and compassion.

There were exceptions, of course. Naamah didn’t act like that. And here and there, I’d encountered a cherub or even a seraph who, while acknowledging my difference in rank in terms of decision-making power or assigned tasks, didn’t make me feel inferior.

I could only hope that this Aziel dude would not be an asshole angel. Otherwise, training with him for weeks would be torture. And I couldn’t exactly say no to Naamah’s offer and just not train with him. For one thing, because I didn’t want to disappoint Naamah, but more importantly, I really needed the training, and it wasn’t like any other high-ranking angels were lining up to help me with this.

Well, I’d just go into it hoping for the best, and if Aziel gave me an attitude, I’d give him one right back. After all, he couldn’t say no to this either. Not with Naamah’s favor compelling him to train me. Depending on how Naamah worded her request for recompense, he’d be honor-bound to effectively train me until I reached my goal of winning the competition, and he couldn’t just walk away from it.

So, if he wanted to sneer at me, he’d have to face my contrary nature for the time he was bound to me. If I had one thing going for me, it was to give as good as I got. I might avoid confrontations as much as I could, but there was a limit to what I’d take when someone poked at me. My mouth had gotten me into trouble more times than not, and a snarky response was never far from the tip of my tongue when I was backed into a corner.

With these thoughts running through my head, I made my way to my assignment today—taking care of Derdekea’s souls.

* * *

The sunlight streamedthrough the windows of the apartment, painting the scene in warm, golden hues. From my vantage point in the far corner of the room, I observed how the woman reacted, adjusting the projection minutely to the cues I picked from her mind.

This wasn’t the apartment she’d lived in right before she’d died. It was the one she remembered from her youth, when she’d first left her parents’ house to brave the world on her own. It was the first time she’d been happy and carefree in a long while, her childhood having been fraught with tension from the behavior of her parents, who—going by her memories—should absolutely have been to therapy yet had refused to acknowledge that they needed it.

Consequently, the woman’s idea of Heaven, of a happy afterlife, did not include her parents. They were nowhere to be seen in her projection, and they wouldn’t feature in it at any point, except maybe to give her the apology she’d never heard from them in her mortal life.

Maybe I’d make them grovel in front of her later.

I fiddled with the details of the room, subtly adding a vase I’d just spotted in her memories.

Souls never truly figured out that the environment they perceived around them wasn’t actually real. That whatever surroundings they saw were merely a kind of virtual reality conjured by an angel to represent their personal idea of Heaven, to give them the maximum amount of contentment and happiness.

It was so different for everybody. For some, it meant being among all their loved ones, enveloped in a constant stream of visits from the people they’d cared about in life. For others, it was the solitude of a small cottage amid a flowering garden, with maybe an occasional visit from a person they loved.

The souls realized they were in Heaven, yes, that they’d died and passed on into the immortal realm, but they didn’t know that what they saw around them was a very individualized projection made for only them, from their respective memories and preferences, and not what the entirety of Heaven looked like.

And they didn’t have the slightest idea that when they saw one of their loved ones, it wasn’t actually that person’s soul they saw. It was part of their individual projection, a memory of that person, an image of them plucked from the soul’s mind.

Souls in Heaven never truly interacted.

When I’d first found out about this, I’d been shocked, and a little miffed. Of course souls in Heaven would interact! Entire religions were founded on this concept, that one would get to see and hug and speak with the people one had loved in life. Right? This idea that we would all get our happy ending and meet those again who’d had to leave us too soon, that we’d get to hang out together and enjoy eternity side by side.

Except, that was not how things actually worked in Heaven.

Up here, souls were kept separate from each other, each in their own little room. An angel would be tasked with creating an individualized afterlife projection around the soul, crafting this virtual reality that was authentic enough to make the soul believe it was real. Of course, the soul would know that this was their afterlife, that the environment they saw was a piece of Heaven, and that was okay. Souls were really chill about this. Something about being in Heaven, in general, put them totally at ease.

But they’d still think the images they saw of other people were those people’s souls, as in they’d really interact with other deceased up here. When in reality, they only ever interacted with their own memories of their loved ones.

Though I’d been appalled by this at first, I’d come to see it from a different side after some time. The system did have advantages.

If a soul only ever talked to a projection of a loved one crafted from their own happy memories, it meant there’d never be heartbreak. There’d never be strife or arguments, and they’d never slowly drift apart over eternity, because that projection of their loved one was, as a general rule, positive only.

When we as angels drew on the soul’s memories, we never plucked details from the negative ones. And the soul’s disposition in Heaven was to lean into happiness rather than unpleasant recollections. So the image they’d see of the people who’d been dearest to them in life would never disappoint them, never leave them, never hurt them.

There was a certain kind of peace in that.

In addition to that, this system of individualized afterlife projections that didn’t interfere with or touch on other souls’ ideas of Heaven meant that some potentially very cringe cases of reunions would never happen.

For example, if a guy married the love of his life, they had children, they spent decades living together as a family until they both died of old age, and then they got to Heaven, but instead of enjoying eternity with his wife, the poor guy then had to realize there was this dude she’d met on a boat when she was seventeen and had a hot affair with for four days until an iceberg sunk the boat and lover boy died, but the wife had been kind of hung up on him all her life, and now the boat dude wanted a piece of her in Heaven.

So much cringe.

With the individualized afterlife projections, though, it was possible to accommodate such cases. That way, the wife might have both her husband and her young lover—images crafted from her memories—with her, all of them happily living together, while the lover boy might get his own idea of Heaven with the woman, as a memory, being with him, without anyone else, and the husband similarly might have his ideal afterlife consisting of living with his wife without the presence or memory of the young lover intruding.

If none of these three souls actually interacted, each could have their own version of “happily ever after” and never know the difference. To them, it was real, and they were content.

The door behind me, which looked like a regular door in the apartment but actually led out of the projection room and into the corridor of the building where Derdekea’s souls were stored, opened, and Eremiel, my direct supervisor, walked in.

He stopped just beside me, sighed, and gestured at the scene in front of us. “What is this?”

I bit my lip. “Her idea of Heaven?”

“She’s covered in kittens.”

“Fluffy balls of happiness,” I corrected him with a raised finger.

Eremiel, a generally rule-loving angel with a penchant for finding everything around him annoying, pinched the bridge of his nose and then pointed at the chart he held in his other hand. It showed a graph depicting this soul’s energy production. “You need to step up your game, Chaya. This is well below average. She’s not as happy as she should be.”

I pressed my lips together, gave a tight nod, and then summoned a notepad and pen and scribbled something down.

“What are you doing?” Eremiel asked, his voice just this side of irritated.

“Taking notes so I won’t forget?—”

Eremiel snatched the notepad from my hands and squinted at it. “More kittens,” he read, then leveled a resigned look at me. “We’ve been over this. You can’t keep adding kittens to every soul’s afterlife projection. Baby felines are not the universal key to happiness.”

I clutched my chest and feigned a heart attack. “You don’t mean that.”

Eremiel turned away with a sigh. “I’ll take over from here. Your shift’s almost finished anyway. But I expect you to do better next time. Go.” He waved me out of the room, then growled at my back, “No more kittens!”

I saluted him and slipped out into the corridor while Eremiel re-crafted the woman’s afterlife projection to better reflect her preferences. Pausing in the hallway—bathed in soft light from the dozens of glowing crystals attached to the walls—I considered his words for a second, then nodded decisively and scribbled on my notepad again.

“He clearly said, ‘No—more kittens!’ Punctuation and intonation are very important.”

And with a grin on my face, I headed outside.

* * *

Naamah’s instructionson where to meet led me to a small cliff overlooking more rolling meadows, with a roaring waterfall tumbling over the side of the rocky bluff. The sapphire waters of the river kept snaking through the valley below, a beautiful complement to the dark purple of the plains. The never-changing light of the sunset sky sparkled on the waves and kissed the windswept grass with dramatic colors.

I landed next to Naamah, who waited for me at the bottom of the cliff, on the banks of the river, right next to the gushing spray of the waterfall.

Folding my wings and then disappearing them, I walked up to her. “Quite a remote place,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the din of the rushing water. I’d had to fly for almost an hour to get here, my back muscles now screaming at me.

“All the better to hide clandestine meetings,” Naamah replied with a wink. “It’s not that easy to find a spot where you two can train without catching someone’s attention.”

I looked around the cliff face and the terrain next to the river, the area covered with either high grass or rocks of various sizes. “I’m not sure we can really spar here. The ground’s not exactly right for it.”

“You won’t train out here,” she said and flicked a finger against my forehead. “You’ll be inside.”

“Inside?”

She jerked her head toward the waterfall. “There’s a large cave behind it. That way, you won’t be spotted from the sky by random passersby, and the noise of the waterfall will mask the sounds of your fighting.”

“Oooh, smart.” I rocked back on my heels and pursed my lips appreciatively. “You outdid yourself.”

Naamah regarded her nails with raised brows. “I don’t know why people keep doubting my skills.”

“So, when is he going to get here?”

“He’s here already.” She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. “He’s waiting for you inside.”

A jolt of excitement zapped me, and my stomach decided to imitate some fizzy chemical concoction. I snuck closer to the bend around the rock underneath the waterfall that supposedly led to the cave, trying to get a glimpse of him first.

His power hit me before I could even peek around the corner. I froze as his energy washed over my senses, arresting my breath. My heart started a mad gallop, my own energy responding with a force that almost buckled my legs.

With a gasp, I tore away from the cave opening and rounded on Naamah. “You didn’t tell me he’s a seraph!” I whisper-yelled at her.

A fucking powerful one, to boot. I’d only felt a similar raw amount of strength in the presence of one of the archangels.

Naamah shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

I flailed. “I thought you’d get me a dominion, or a throne, maybe even a cherub, at the very most. What am I supposed to do with a seraph?” I hissed, my pulse skyrocketing.

“Learn from him,” she said with an eye roll.

“He’s going to crush me!”

“He’ll do no such thing. Trust me, giving you trouble of any sort is the last thing on his mind.” She leveled a meaningful look at me, of which I didn’t catch half the meaning, I was sure.

And when I opened my mouth to utter some other fear-sparked response, she shut my jaw with a gentle gesture. “You need someone powerful enough to teach you the skills you need to win a competition. He is that. Now quit your whining and go meet him. He hasn’t got all day, you know?”

I inhaled a steadying breath. Right, yeah, I could do this. Pumping myself up, I nodded at Naamah, who gave me a thumbs-up and waved me on, and then I turned to the cave entrance below the waterfall.

“He’s just another angel,” I whispered to myself as I walked beneath the overhang, the spray of the water misting my skin. “Nothing special. A bit more powerful, that’s all. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, like the rest of us.”

When I rounded the bend and stepped into the large cave that was lit by crystals dispersed between the stalagmites littering the floor close to the walls, my gaze immediately snapped to him. His presence filled the room, made the generous space of the natural chamber seem far smaller than it was. His energy suffused the air, a heavy press of power that crashed against my senses, making my instincts quiver. But what truly stole my breath, as if someone had punched all the air out of my lungs, was the sight of him.

Broad-shouldered, with muscles that spoke of regular fighting exercises and hard-earned prowess in battle, he stood with a poise that exuded effortless authority. He was dressed in the typical combat garb among angels—leather-braided armor reinforced with titanium plating that gleamed silver in the low light of the crystals, over a dark pants-and-tunic combo, his bare forearms protected by vambraces. At his belt hung a long sword, and I could make out daggers strapped to his thighs as well.

All that paled, however, in comparison to his face, to the intensity of his expression. I’d seen many a beautiful angel here in Heaven, both male and female. Our kind didn’t lack for looks, that was for sure, and I should have been well used to this level of gorgeousness, maybe even desensitized to it. I’d thought I couldn’t be stunned into silence anymore by esthetics, but clearly, I’d been wrong.

I hadn’t met him yet.

As it was, I stared—open-mouthed, to my disgrace—at the impossible mix of hard, rugged masculinity and achingly elegant beauty that was his face. Strong lines drew his features, from his jaw to his cheekbones to the straight nose, his mouth the only hint of softness. And his eyes…tempests of silver underneath black brows, broiling storms of emotion that struck a chord deep inside me.

For a second, the instance our gazes met, a connection snapped into place, so powerful that it made me sway on my feet. Everything else fell away—the cave, the crystals, the roar of the water outside the entrance—and what remained was a pulsing bond between me and this angel whom I’d never met before in my life, this angel who, in this very moment, looked at me like I was the answer to all his questions, the long-yearned-for sunrise after a night of suffocating darkness.

And there, in the depths of my soul, chimed an echo of that impression, a note of bruised-and-beaten hope for an unnameable, unknown treasure once lost.

It only lasted a heartbeat, and then the moment passed, and I blinked at the angel, confused and slightly dizzy, a headache forming behind my temples. I frowned and rubbed my forehead, closing my eyes against the throb of pain.

“For the record,” the angel said, drawing my attention back to him, “I don’t put my pants on one leg at a time.” His smooth, deep voice sounded entirely serious, the glint in his eyes the only hint at the humor behind his words. “I conjure them onto my body with my mighty seraph power.”

I sucked in a sharp breath, my face flaming hot. “You heard?”

“Every word.” Those sensual lips twitched up into a smirk.

“But I whispered! And the waterfall was so loud!”

He laughed softly, and it was utterly unfair how much more drop-dead gorgeous he became when his face lit up with genuine humor, those silver-gray eyes of his sparkling with mirth. Tapping his ear, he said, “Seraph hearing.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, then pressed my lips together to hide my growing grin at the way he’d deliberately defused my nervousness with a well-aimed joke. “Okay, fine, point taken. No need for me to be anxious. You’re not a big, bad dude.”

“That’s debatable,” he muttered under his breath.

“So, do you—” I said, then stopped short because I’d completely forgotten protocol here. Whether he was easygoing or not, he was still a seraph, which made him my superior by three whole ranks, and here I was, just babbling at him as if he were a good buddy of mine on the same rung of the hierarchy ladder.

I uttered a small squeak and then went down on one knee, bowing my head. “Apologies, my lord. I should have greeted you properly. I meant no disrespect.”

A pulse of power—distinctly angered—throbbed through the air, raising the hairs on my arms and neck. The next second, he was right in front of me, pulling me up to standing with a gentle grip on my arm. At his touch, a faint electric shock coursed over my skin, making me shiver. His expression was thunderous, and I shrank away a bit.

Shit, I’d really offended him with my blunder, hadn’t I?

His fingers softly grabbed my chin and lifted my face so I looked straight at him again, his other hand still holding my arm. “You,” he said, his voice half a growl, “don’t ever bow to me.”